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Donald Trump is the candidate who is so rigid in his pervertedself-righteousness that he doesn’t “like to have to ask forforgiveness.” He says he has never even sought forgivenessfrom God, the divine author and inspiration of his favorite book,from which he struggled to name a favorite verse. . .

Precisely what does Trump regret? . . .

I don’t believe, even for a nanosecond, that he regrets thepersonal impact of what he has said on anyone besides himself. . .

I believe that Trump regrets that, as Lindsey Graham putit last week, “People are getting pretty nervous about ourcandidate because he’s in a death spiral here and nobodyknows where the bottom is at.” Trump’s “regret” is justa cynical ploy to set a bottom and bounce back.

But it will take more than the 75-plus remaining days of thiscampaign to disassemble what it took 70 years of his lifeto build.

He is who he is.

This fragile narcissist, who is a sort of bottomless pit ofemotional need and affirmation, is easily injured by even theslightest confrontation.

He is a man who has said of himself, “I have no friends, asfar as I’m concerned,” as he joked that it would be easy toget big money out of politics. But that claim is worrisome,a thing that only a bully would say.

Yes, he can work a crowd, work a screen and work a Twitteraccount. He can channel anger, hatred and bigotry and give ita voice and face and standing. He can make bombast feel likebravado. He can lower discourse and raise the rabble.

He has the gifts of a grifter. . .

Trump thinks of himself as a great man — that is the premise ofhis entire sales pitch, that America has faltered and can onlybe made great again by the Midas touch of his tiny hands — but ifcurrent trends continue and he suffers a staggering loss onElection Day, his ego will be forever injured as he is assignedto history not as a great man but as a great disaster, acautionary tale of what comes of a party that picks acon man as its frontman. . .

There is something rotten at the core of this man that no lengthof script or turn of phrase can ameliorate.====

A disaster area is no place for political theater. The governorof flood-ravaged Louisiana asked President Obama to postponea personal visit while relief efforts were still underway. . .He made the same request to Donald Trump, declaring, reasonably,that while aid would be welcome, a visit for the sake of aphoto op would not.

Sure enough, the G.O.P. candidate flew in, shook some hands,signed some autographs, and was filmed taking boxes of Play-Dohout of a truck. If he wrote a check, neither his campaign noranyone else has mentioned it. . .

But boorish, self-centered behavior is the least of it.By far the bigger issue is that even as Mr. Trump made aham-handed (and cheapskate) effort to exploit Louisiana’slatest disaster for political gain, he continued to stakeout a policy position that will make such disasters increasinglyfrequent. . .

Remember when climate deniers used to point to a temporarycooling after an unusually warm year in 1998 as “proof” thatglobal warming had stopped? It was always a foolish,dishonest argument, but in any case we’ve now blown rightthrough all past records.

And one consequence of a warmer planet is more evaporation,more moisture in the air, and hence more disastrous floods.As always, you can’t say that climate change caused anyparticular disaster. What you can say is that warming makesextreme weather events more likely, so that, for example,what used to be 500-year floods are now happening on analmost routine basis. . .

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that when it comes toclimate change, as with so many issues, Mr. Trump has gone deepdown the rabbit hole, asserting not just that global warmingis a hoax, but that it’s a hoax concocted by the Chinese tomake America less competitive.

The thing is, he’s not alone in going down that rabbit hole. . .

[W]hen it comes to denial of climate change and the deploymentof bizarre conspiracy theories to explain away the evidence,Mr. Trump is squarely in the Republican mainstream. He maybe talking nonsense, but anyone his party was likely tonominate would have been talking pretty much the same nonsense.

It’s interesting to ask why climate denial has become not justacceptable but essentially required within the G.O.P. Yes,the fossil-fuel sector is a big donor to the party. But thevehemence of the hostility to climate science seems disproportionateeven so. . . What’s happening, I suspect, is that climate denialhas become a sort of badge of right-wing identity. . .

In any case, this election is likely to be decisive for the climate,one way or another. . .====